Trulia finds a home for large-scale agile development using Jira and Bitbucket

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Through its numerous mobile and web products, Trulia provides home buyers and sellers essential information about the real estate market. Simultaneously, it offers real estate professionals a technology platform to better find and serve clients.

ChallengeTrulia’s 250-person engineering team develops and maintains all of Trulia’s web properties and mobile applications, as well as the company's internal systems. From the very early days, the team adopted agile methodologies, but as the company continued to grow, it faced challenges in scaling agile. "Communication and alignment became big issues for us,” says Chief Technology Officer Daniele Farnedi.

"We were using a lot of different tools to manage our development cycle – navigating through different UIs, different logins, etc. It caused a lot of friction in our workflow,” says Louis Bennett, director of engineering for Trulia's Consumer Web Products.

SolutionWith help from Atlassian Platinum Expert cPrime, "we consolidated the entire engineering department with Atlassian and focused on integrating workflows between Jira and Bitbucket,” says Nate Van Dusen, engineering program management director. "As a result, we’ve been able to greatly improve communication while effectively scaling our agile practices.” Trulia also uses Confluence with Jira so teams can share knowledge across the company.

According to Van Dusen, the integration between Jira and other Atlassian products was a major draw. "The Jira/Bitbucket integration has transformed the way our software teams are able to communicate, work together, and deploy code. It's been an absolute game changer for us."

Automatic transitions, which ensure Bitbucket pull requests are always in sync with Jira tickets, "are a huge boon to us and help us increase our productivity,” says Bennett. "We are able to spend more time coding and less time jumping between different tools.”

BenefitsFor Trulia, less friction in the development process means better results and a faster time to market. Bennett likes those results: "We're able to develop and deliver higher quality products faster and more efficiently."

"The days of managing work items with sticky notes and a bunch of fragmented tools are long gone. You can't deliver a quality product at this scale without having tools like the Atlassian suite,” concludes Van Dusen.

The biggest benefit of consolidating our platform on Atlassian has been providing a single point of visibility over our projects. Now we can see what everybody else is doing and understand each project's status in great detail. That enables everyone to be on the same page.— Daniele Farnedi, chief technology officer, Trulia